Lebanon seeks peace, but Hezbollah needs to be convinced first, according to a report from the BBC. With Israel carrying out near-daily attacks on targets linked to the group, the situation remains fragile. In a meeting with President Joseph Aoun at the Baabda Palace in August, the former army chief expressed his optimism about resolving the long-standing issue of Hezbollah’s weapons. Aoun, who took office after a devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah, had vowed to disarm the group, which is backed by Iran.

Forged in Conflict

Hezbollah, or the Party of God in Arabic, was created in the 1980s during Israel’s occupation of Lebanon in the Lebanese Civil War. From its beginning, the group has been financed, trained, and armed by Iran, and the destruction of Israel remains one of its official goals. In 1989, the Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon’s conflict mandated the disarmament of all militias and introduced a power-sharing deal between sects in a country that is multi-cultural and multi-faith. However, Hezbollah, branding itself as a resistance movement fighting the Israeli occupation, managed to keep its weapons.

Israel withdrew its troops in 2000 after an 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, but territorial disputes remained. The United Nations Resolution 1701, that ended the war with Israel in 2006 and demanded Hezbollah’s disarmament, has never been fully implemented. The group is designated as a terrorist organization by countries including the UK and the US. But, in Lebanon, Hezbollah is more than a militia. It is a political party represented in parliament and in the government, and a social movement that runs services including schools and hospitals in areas where the state has been absent. It is the country’s most powerful group.

A Government Without Cards

Lebanon, a tiny country measuring just 4,000 square miles on the eastern Mediterranean, has a population of around 5.8 million and officially recognizes 18 religious sects. Two-thirds of its people are thought to be Muslim – Sunni and Shia populations are relatively equal in size – and a third is Christian. In December, a Gallup poll suggested that nearly four in five Lebanese were in favor of only the country’s army being allowed to maintain weapons – in other words, that factions including Hezbollah should be disarmed.

Responses to the poll, unsurprisingly, followed default lines. There was overwhelming support among Christians, Druze, and Sunnis; more than two-thirds of Lebanese Shias disagreed. Michael Young, senior editor at the Carnegie Center think tank in Beirut, told me that some people ‘were naïve to think that the army’, chronically underequipped and underfunded, had not disarmed Hezbollah ‘because of a lack of will’.

‘You can’t come to the Shia community and impose this by force. You’ll fail, and this will be a disaster. Armies are not made to enter military confrontations with their own population,’ he said. ‘What does it mean to disarm a group like Hezbollah? Does the army have the capacity to go into every Shia home and disarm it? No, it doesn’t. Can they go into areas where Hezbollah has missiles and heavy weapons and disarm those areas? They can’t.’

‘Our Patience Has Limits’

In a televised address last month, Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, said the group had not responded to Israel’s attacks during the ceasefire to ‘not be accused of impeding diplomacy’ but that Israel ‘had not abided by a single term’ of the deal. Israeli troops had also remained in five positions in the south occupied during the war, in another violation of the agreement, measures Israeli officials said were needed to protect the country’s northern communities.

‘Our patience has limits,’ Qassem said, and Hezbollah ‘would not debate… its weapons with anyone’. So, can it ever disarm? Armed resistance is key in Hezbollah’s raison d’être – its flag features a hand carrying an assault rifle. The group is part of what Iran calls the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an alliance of armed factions that include Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Houthis in Yemen.

They have been severely downgraded by Israel and the US in the conflicts that followed the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 but not defeated. Nicholas Blanford, the author of Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel, told me that, given Iran’s role, any decision about the group’s path would likely be made not in Beirut, but in Tehran.

Last year, I reported from southern Lebanon on how communities were living under fear from the constant Israeli attacks, and some appeared to question Hezbollah’s strategy. In this conflict, the group has demonstrated, by attacking Israel and fighting invading forces, that it managed to rebuild some of its military capabilities, degraded in the previous war – as Israel had warned – which had reignited part of its base.

A Western diplomat told me the recovery was led by officials from Iran’s elite Islamic Major Guard Corps, who were senior. The situation in Lebanon remains volatile, with the Lebanese government facing challenges in negotiating with Israel and convincing Hezbollah to disarm. As the country seeks peace, the role of Hezbollah remains a critical factor in any potential resolution.